Hello Jenks and Yardley; bye-bye Jinks and Talbot

To my delight, a new certificate arrived in the post today, and although I am engrossed in Vance family research, this was a very exciting development because it not only gives me a new generation of Lunts, and a new surname, but also a correction to part of the tree.

The certificate in question was a copy of the marriage register for the aristocratic-sounding (but illiterate) Charles Lunt and Elizabeth Jenks. They married in St George's parish church, St George Birmingham, in 1851. Neither were literate, it seems, as both have made their mark with an 'x', and so have their witnesses. But now I know that Charles' father was called William (yes, another one to add to the tree...), and the father of Elizabeth was called Joseph, not Thomas as I had previously thought. This means that the sweet lady Anita Jinks who had contacted me through GenesReunited has got her tree wrong when marrying up her Elizabeth Jinks to my Charles Lunt. And the name on this marriage register is most decidedly 'Jenks', not Jinks.

I've got to admit to relief about that (even though Anita was very sweet), because frankly the name 'Jinks' reminded me of the shifty and not very trustworthy character from the Pickwick Papers. It also means that I bid farewell to the name Talbot, for I had copied Sarah Talbot down as the mother of Elizabeth Jenks, and this is now complete tosh.

On the plus side, I have an entire family of Lunts who were previously lost to time, and although they crammed all eight of themselves into a Kathleen Dayus-style back-to-back terrace which no doubt only had three rooms (St Georges is now called Newtown and um, I'm glad I don't have to live there), the nice thing about them is that William, the father, was a 'brass founder'. My goodness, doesn't non-ferrous metal flow through the Lunt veins?

Through the LDS site I now know that William Lunt was born in Feb 1805 and married Eliza Yardley (nice brummie name for you) who was a year older than he was, on 23 June 1823 at St Philip's Birmingham.

I don't know why but I simply can't help it: when I see that a couple married from May to September then I imagine a chaste love match. When I see they've married on dates like 17 February I always suspect that there's a more pressing reason for the wedding...harsh, but true. But 23 June is, after all, a very nice date for a wedding - even if it is in the middle of Birmingham....